Millennials say suburbs are their ideal place to live

Anyone who wants to make an intelligent case for the “death of the suburbs” needs to confront the fact that more people, including young people, prefer suburban to city living, and act in accordance with their preferences.

According to a study by Frank N. Magid Associates, 43 percent of Millennials describe suburbs as their “ideal place to live,” compared to just 31 percent of older generations. Even though big cities are often thought of as the place where young people prefer to live and work, only 17 percent of Millennials say they want to settle in one. This was the same percentage of members of this generation that expressed a preference for living in either rural or small town America. Nor are Millennials particularly anxious to spend their lives as renters. A full 64 percent of Millennials surveyed, said it was “very important” to have an opportunity to own their own home.

My firm relocated 3 families from north side to north shore in the past 6 months. I think there is a trend. Crime, Taxes, etc. Plus the schools are fantastic and the private schools downtown are packed. Granted I am focusing on the more affluent segment.

The notion that young families should live in suburban a community with a house with a yard and garden, a few solar panels and a private well sounds awfully appealing to me. Why should anyone be dependent on a broken urban system?

Our City (and I am a native) sucks. I say that with love. The schools suck. The red line is disgusting. The homelessness and filth are on the rise. Not to mention the murder rate. And the top cop wants to ban guns which is absurd.

If you come out as a supporter of the City of Chicago you should come strong with more that criticism. Otherwise you’re another LIBERAL hack.

I clicked on the link and did a little link-hopping, but I couldn’t find any info on the actual questions Magid asked. It’s a shame, because the results of a preference study can be wildly distorted by the nature of the questions asked.

Were respondents given any guideposts in comparing these different urban forms? Presumably, Magid would see different results for the question “Do you prefer to live in a city or a suburb?” and the question “Assuming you spend the same amount of money on housing in either place, do you prefer to live in a city or a suburb?” I also don’t how how Magid defined suburb, if at all. Did they actively draw a distinction between Evanston-type suburbs and Lake Zurich-type suburbs, or did they leave it up to the respondents to define what “suburb” means to them? For that matter, did Magid draw a distinction between big city neighborhoods such as the South Loop and Avondale, or were those left undefined too? My sense is that this survey was constructed with lazy and ill-defined parameters, and therefore doesn’t shed much light on anything useful.

A more general problem is that asking people what they would like in their dream world doesn’t do a good job of revealing what their actual preferences are in the real world. Christopher Leinberger, Ryan Avent, and others have done wonderful analysis on revealed preferences of homebuyers and renters. By considering the interaction of price, supply, and migration dynamics, we can often get a fuller picture of what housing consumers value. Deciding where to live is all about making dozens of trade-offs (between housing cost, transportation cost, transportation time, schools, safety, etc.), and how people actually respond to those trade-offs is a very difficult thing to capture in a preference survey.

The folks at marketurbanism.com have done a bang-up job detailing newgeography.com’s persistent methodological flaws, among them conflating metro areas and cities, failing to consider housing prices when assessing supply and demand, and lumping disparate types of neighborhoods together simply because they share a political boundary. I would be grateful if somebody could point me to the Magid questionnaire, and I hope its designers took some care to define what they were actually asking, but newgeography’s presentation of the data leaves me with little hope that this is anything other than useless white noise.

Would you agree that the best index of what people’s “actual preferences are in the real world” and “how people actually respond” to trade-offs is where they actually move to and from? US cities in general, and Chicago in particular, are not performing well on that index.

Where people move is an important metric, but its not the only important metric. Housing prices play an important role in assessing actual preferences as well, as does the total supply of housing units. If a city loses population as housing prices rise, we should draw very different inferences about its desirability than we should for a city that loses the same amount of population as housing prices fall.

It’s also important to look at these things on the appropriate scale. For instance, saying that “Chicago is losing population” is almost completely meaningless in the context of determining housing consumer preferences, because Chicago has many different types of neighborhoods. As I have commented on this site before, the last census period saw an increase in both the population and housing prices of Chicago’s most walkable and urban neighorhoods, while its most suburban and least walkable neighborhoods lost population.

I suppose I will take this as yet another opportunity to remind you that the price of housing, the occupancy rate of housing, and the supply of housing are fairly useless pieces of information when used in isolation to determine where people want to live. You need to look at all three of them together.

Rogers Park and Uptown lost 13.4% and 11.3% of their population, respectively, between 2000 and 2010. Are they not on your list of “Chicago’s most walkable and urban neighborhoods?” Lake View and Lincoln Park had modest population losses over the decade.

I don’t find the city vs suburban discussion very interesting, regardless of the level of sophistication on which it’s conducted. I’d prefer to continue doing what I have been doing – linking to and quoting from studies and voices that present differing views on the relevant issues.

You continue to harp on the population point without addressing housing prices and housing supply. Why? None of the three potential reasons I can come up with–You find them irrelevant? The data are too difficult to find and manage? Including price and supply would undercut the point you try to make in your original post?–reflect very well on you, but it’s entirely possible I’m missing some other reason that you’re reducing the housing consumer market to a single incomplete metric.

What point do you think I tried to make in my original post? You seem to be addressing a different point than the simple one I made, to wit:

Anyone who wants to make an intelligent case for the “death of the suburbs” needs to confront the fact that more people, including young people, prefer suburban to city living, and act in accordance with their preferences.

Aurora’s population grew more between 2000 and 2010 than did downtown Chicago’s – 55k vs 48K. Chicago’s suburban population grew by more than 350K while city population shrank by 200K over the same period.

Throw in as many variables as you want. Where’s the “death of the suburbs?”

Anyone who wants to make an intelligent case for the “death or vitality of any particular urban form” needs to confront the fact that relying on population numbers alone makes for a really weak argument.

No, I’m not going to make that argument, but thanks for the strawman by preterition. That’s a new one for me.

If I were going to make an argument about the suburbs, it would be along the lines of the Christopher Leinberger’s, which is that many people dream of living in auto-oriented suburbs (and good for them!) but many others living in those same suburbs are priced out of their dream of walkable urbanism due to supply constraints.

Do you have access to the Magid study? I’m interested in seeing how they structured their questions, but I can’t find anything about it on the Magid site or newgeography. Also, do you know if a client commissioned this study from Magid (and if so, who?), or was it on Magid’s own initiative?

I realize the answer to all of these may be “no” but I’m hoping that maybe you (or some other commenter) found info on newgeography that I missed.

I can’t find the original study. It appears to have been commissioned by NDN, an organization I’m unfamiliar with.

I’m also unfamiliar with how Magid operates these days. Thirty years ago a principal of one of my clients was director of radio research for Magid. He was a serious, accomplished, independent individual, and Magid was a highly-regarded source of objective research for the broadcast industry. At that time Magid’s research was commissioned by organizations that acted on it to competitive advantage and the actual reports themselves were considered confidential. No idea whether that’s relevant here.

Why can’t urbanists accept this? There is still a place for center cities, and certainly still a strong market for them. But the reality is, suburbs are here to stay. Why not enjoy the qualities that both environments have to offer?